The general decrease in the quantity of letter-writing due, among other reasons, to the telephone, the trolley and railroads, and the increased rapidity of life in general, undoubtedly has influenced the mere bulk of sentimental correspondence, though concrete instances are conflicting. One young man of my acquaintance writes to his sweetheart every day. Another, who has been engaged for some months, confessed to writing to the young woman (she lives in another city) once a week; “and do you know,” he said, “I have a deuce of a time to find anything to say!” Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. Indeed, I knew a girl who went on believing in the author of certain letters after the most disenchanting honeymoon that ever woman endured, after society had looked askance at her, after the towering lie of those letters had cast a blighting shadow across her life. [Illustration: Thoughts] One pretty and pleasant little woman in Kentucky told me that when she was engaged she sometimes got two letters a day. “And when we were married I missed those letters so!” And this was indubitably a happy marriage. I knew in just what sort of place those letters would be kept, and just how they would be tied up, and could fancy just how she would look in the dim of a rainy day when she brought them forth and spread them out--by the cradle. [Illustration: Thoughts]